2. Shanghai University (draft)

Concentrating on his footing because the drizzle had made the paving stones slippery, Kurt glanced up only to avoid walking into the trees planted in the middle of the footpath. The trunks, white with insecticide paint, glowed in the darkness, and Kurt struggled to believe the skeletal branches would grow leaves ever again. Disinfectant hit his nose on the escalator descending into the Dongchang Road subway station. He swiped his card, passed through the turnstile, and got on another downwards escalator. On the deserted platform, he enjoyed the rare feeling of solitude in a public place: a reward for getting up before six in the morning. Stuffy this far underground, he peeled off his raincoat and jumper.

Kurt got off the train at People’s Square to transfer to line one. Walking through the cavernous station he checked out his fellow commuters. Labourers in shabby suits. Check. Squat middle-aged women carrying awkward red, white, and blue calico bags? Yes, check. Businessmen in maroon polyester polo shirts. Not yet. Girls with pink pom-poms attached to their hats and gloves. No, too early.

He boarded the second-to-last-carriage of the train bound for Xinzhuang. Two stops later, at Shanxi South Road, Reece, as expected, Reece boarded the same carriage. Like Kurt, Reece was headed to the Minhang campus to teach class.

‘How’s your girlfriend,’ Kurt asked. A failure proof conversation starter.

‘Bloody hell! Sleeps all day and then rings me when I’m on my way home telling me she needs stuff from the local market. When I get home, she asks how much I paid for the fish, the pork, the chillies, the baicai, the cucumbers, the onions, and so on. She then scolds me for paying too much. It’s my money!

‘She cooks well though.’

‘How sexist, judging her by her cooking.’

Kurt, knowing Reece wasn’t serious, didn’t bother trying to defend the comment. Reece had invited Kurt around to his girlfriend Ronghua’s cooking once. On his way to Reese’s apartment, Kurt had been surprised to receive a call from Ronghua. Especially as he’d never met before. She gave him a long list of groceries and directions to a market near Shanxi South Road. 

When Kurt had arrived at Reece’s apartment, a curvy Chinese woman dressed in orange long johns opened the door. She grabbed his shopping bags, and revised his purchases.

‘You’ve forgotten the potatoes!’ She’d said in horror.

‘Sorry, hard to remember it all.’

Kurt got off light: she didn’t ask him about how much he’d paid.

The dinner was excellent even without the potatoes.

Apart from being a great cook, Ronghua was addicted to betting on mahjong, the tile-based strategy game beloved by many in China. Kurt had met her when, as a waitress at a dumpling restaurant, she’d taken his order. After a few dates, he received a call from her saying she couldn’t pay her rent. Thinking of the sex, he said she could stay with him. For Kurt the whole scenario sounded off. Didn’t restaurant workers from out of town get provided dormitory accommodation? Well, yes they did. And later it came out that Ronghua had lost her job and therefore her accommodation. She then failed to find another job. She didn’t contribute to the household beyond cooking and constantly asked Reece for ‘loans.’ Reece had been summoning the courage to kick Ronghua out for six months.

‘But where would she go?’ Kurt had asked when Reece told him he wanted Ronghua out.

‘Back to her bloody village in Anhui.’

At the French Concession stops of Changshou Road and Huaihai Road boarding passengers scrambled for the remaining seats. A construction worker in a dusty suit missed out, and settled on standing in front of Kurt and Reece. He started shouting into his phone at a volume that made conversation for those in his immediate vicinity impossible. The worker held the phone to his ear in one hand and scratched his cheek with the other. It impressed Kurt he didn’t have to hold the handrail to steady himself on the moving train.  When this character finished his deafening telephone conversation, Reece said:

¨This trip is tiring man? How long does it take you to get to Minhang from bumfuck Pudong?”

‘About two hours. Two and a half on the way back because of traffic. And I find bumfuck Pudong offensive.’

‘You’re kidding?’ Reece’s face fell. Kurt’s seemingly politically correct utterance was a no-no. One of the reasons characters like Reece and Kurt had escaped the West was to escape people who reveled in being triggered by off hand comments.

‘Don’t worry, not the term itself. I mean it’s offensive when applied to where I live. Dongchung Road is one stop away from the centre of the universe: Lujiazui. When they promote China as the country of the future on CCTV, that’s what they show, the Skyscrapers of Lujiazui. The Bottle Opener, the Syringe, and the Pearl Tower—China’s most impressive agglomeration of skyscrapers.’

With a relieved look on his face, Reece changed the subject:

‘You know what we should do, Kurt? Set up our own gig. Rent a place in Xuhui…teach IELTS courses. We can charge a lot for those. I’ve got a lot of materials.’

‘Won’t we need a business license? A Chinese partner?’

‘They’re easy to find.’

‘Setting up your own school that’s what loads of laowai laobaixing want to do.’

‘Just because a dream isn’t original doesn’t mean it isn’t feasible. What do you mean by laowai laobaixing?’

‘You know what laobaixing means in Chinese, right?’

‘Sure, the hundred old names, the masses, the unimportant people.’

‘I know the Chinese would tell me I’m misusing the term. They don’t trust foreigners with their language. But I don’t care. I think of us as the laowai equivalent of the laobaixing. I didn’t get the vibe when I worked in Dalian, but here in Shanghai it’s clear we’re the bottom rung. Other expats look down on English teachers.’

‘I know, but it’s bullshit.’

‘But why don’t they respect us? I’ve tried to analyse it.’

‘Here we go, what have you come up with?’ Reece smiled a smile which said I’m half enjoying and half hating this conversation.

‘It’s an imperfect comparison to an foreign English teacher here, but what about being a barista back home? Making coffee is a job that most people can do but it’s hard work and you have to deal with difficult customers. People don’t look down on baristas. The bad reputation English teachers in Asia have is unfair. A lot of them are drunken horndogs but same deal with the laowai on expat packages … working for Google or Coca-cola or wherever. But it’s human nature: have a group to look down on and you feel better about yourself.’

‘You are sticking up for teachers but you hate the job,’ Reece said, his smile morphing to that of a provocateur. 

‘I want to get out of teaching, true. It doesn’t suit my personality.’

‘But you want to stay in Asia and you can’t figure out how to leave teaching so for now you’re treading water. That’s another common type of laowai teacher, the one in denial of what they are. You aren’t going to get a better paying job in China, Kurt. Teaching is hard, I get it. Just put some more effort in and it´ll be more rewarding.’

‘And how much preparation have you done for today’s classes?’

Reece’s smile widened.

A distorted announcement coming out of crook speakers informed them that Xujiahui was the next stop. They got off here and took an escalator up from the platform into the vast station.

‘Which fucking exit is it again?’ Reece asked.  

‘You know which one, exit fifteen. I get your point though, this station is an unfathomable labyrinth. Well, unfathomable no, but labyrinth yes. Which has the most exits, Xujiahui or People’s Square?’ Kurt asked.

‘Good question.’

They ran to make the bus leaving the Xuhui campus of the university. The drizzle had stopped but Kurt still took care over his footing. From Xuhui they had an hour ride to the Minhang campus. Thirty minutes into the journey, the bus full of sleeping Chinese professors passed a nuclear power plant. Kurt found the three massive reactor towers creepy, it reminded him of documentaries he’d seen about Chernobyl. 

‘One day’s it’s gonna blow, mate,’ Reece said loudly.

Kurt laughed. Reece had made this joke before … but Kurt didn’t care. Reece’s company on the bus was golden. Kurt didn’t have anybody else to talk to. The Chinese professors steered clear of the foreign mercenaries. 

Like downtown Shanghai, Minhang was flat. Unlike downtown there wasn’t much there. Empty sections, former farmland marked for development, surrounded the campus of four to six story buildings covered with either red or white tiles.

Kurt’s classroom was on the third floor of a red tiled building with an external staircase which became very slippery when it rained. Despite the cold and the radiator heaters being on, all the windows of the classroom were open. His first class had sixty students on the roll. Fifty showed up. Kurt reckoned he could recall about twenty-five names. He had their English names annotated next to their Chinese ones on his list. He skimmed a few names. Coco? yes he knew who she was. George? No clue. He searched the chalk ledge for a decent stick. The longest piece was two centimeters long. It would do. Hestarted writing questions on the blackboard.

While certainly not carefree, the students seemed to have structured, safe lives between their dormitories and the classroom. Kurt felt little in common with them despite being only six of seven years older. 

The moment to start the class arrived, and because he was nervous Kurt shouted his pitch: ‘OK, today we are talking about the history of the automobile industry. I hope you’ve done the reading from the textbook. Please answer the questions on the board in pairs.’ 

Why am I nervous, he liked to ask himself, he’d been doing this for years. The agency who sent him out to the university as a business English teacher provided photocopied textbooks to the students. The book contained chapters of dry content. Sometimes he tried different topics, jokes, riddles, trends, sports … but the textbook had the advantage that the students were convinced that they had to memorise it to pass the final exam. But that didn’t mean they felt like discussing its contents much.

Kurt walked down the aisle and the students stared at the book, most of them on the right page. Only the extra keen and capable girls asked each other the questions off the board. Most of the boys sat at the back of the class and looked shattered after a busy night of video games.

Pausing to listen to two girls speak, Kurt could see right down the shirt of one. Chinese girls didn’t go around braless. But her bra was ill fitting, so you could see her nipple. In the West you might expect this to be deliberate provocation. But here it was a wardrobe malfunction. Her white breast was small but perfectly formed. Kurt moved on down the aisle guilty. But what could he have done? It was there to look at.

After the speaking activity, he moved onto explaining some grammar. All fifty students looked bored. But to endure boredom was normal for Chinese students. Kurt felt like giving up, lying down on the dusty classroom floor and bursting into tears, and he didn’t even have a hangover. 

When class finished, he sat down behind the teacher’s desk. The students filed past, only the geeky girls bothering to say goodbye. One of the boys, Wolf682, remained behind and to Kurt’s amazement stuck up a conversation. Wolf indicated the copy of Crime and Punishment on Kurt’s desk. ‘I’m reading that too,’ Wolf said in Chinese. ‘Good book.’

‘What’s it called in Chinese,’ Kurt asked.

‘Zui yu fa.’

Kurt knew zui meant crime, and, if he remembered rightly the same character meant guilt too.

‘Goodbye teacher,’ Wolf said in English, not following up his opening conversational gambit. 

Kurt smiled at him, ‘See you next class Wolf’

‘Wolf282 teacher.’

‘OK.’

Kurt felt a connection to this kid. A beer drinking twenty-seven year old Australian English teacher and a twenty-year old Chinese student, both of them would rather hide down the back of the class reading Crime and Punishment

Wolf682’s real name was Zhang Lin. Like many of the others he wore glasses and was rake then. But an envy-inducing almost beard distinguished him from the crowd. Wolf282 had never shaved. Kurt wanted to tell him to do so as this would make his beard grow back thicker. But to convey the message would be difficult.Wolf282 was his username for online gaming. Wolf was a popular moniker, hence the 282. But he didn’t need the numbers for his English name. Chinese didn’t call themselves Ma446466 or Sun467646 to distinguish themselves from other Mas and Suns. But this was another message too difficult to communicate. Wolf’s English was poor. Kurt’s Chinese was a solid intermediate but he had a strong accent. Also, in his experience, university students flatley refused to understand his Chinese.

The students in this morning class all majored in agricultural science. Their English went from advanced to zero. Kurt could use one of the girls with excellent English to translate for Wolf that he needed to drop the 282 and shave. I’ll do it next time, Kurt decided.

Kurt and Reece met for lunch at a Hui pulled noodles joint over the road from the campus. Kurt told Reece about the girl with the open shirt.

‘You sure she didn’t do it on purpose?’

‘I’m sure, she has no idea about her own sex appeal.’

‘Interesting. The weird thing about China is that such goody-two-shoes girls can fall in love with you,’ said Reece, his mouth full of greasy but delicious chow mein. ‘They can be corrupted. It’s what a lot of guys do—especially in cities where there are less English speakers—they start dating students.’

‘Well, as long as they’re all adults.’

‘Do you think Chinese twenty-year-olds are adults?’

Kurt thought about it, ‘No.’

‘I agree. Students are a bad option. I prefer waitresses, receptionists, working women from out of town as you know. And you like your hairdressers. The ones who don’t cut much hair and extract a lot of semen. You feel guilty about it. But hey man you’re not a eunuch, you have needs. It’s not a crime.’

‘Well, technically it is a crime … prostitution.’

‘I think there’s a big debate about whether a handjob is prostitution or just part of a massage. Anyway if it’s a crime all the better for you Kurt. Look at the book you’re reading! Now, I would go down the student route, but I don’t fancy them because they don’t shower often enough. I’m not trying to put them down … it’s a personal thing, I’m picky about hygiene.’

‘They probably only have cold water in their dorms. But that’d be the case for waitresses, too.’

‘Yeah, but now Ronghua showers everyday, using all my hot water.  Hey man, we should go to one of your hairdresser massage parlour places again soon’

‘Maybe.’

Kurt didn’t like the idea because last time they’d gone to a dodgy hairdresser, Reece had been drunk and caused a scene. He’d fallen into a plywood divider, and the Chinese guy in the next cubicle had his hand job interrupted as a large foreigner fell on the girl serving him. Kurt felt mortified that he’d brought such a friend to the establishment, and hadn’t been back to that parlour since. A shame because he liked the Sichuanese women there. Every other hairdresser that was a front for a rub and tug joint he knew was staffed by women from Wenzhou. He had nothing against them but he appreciated having the option of something different.

‘Here, I read it. A grind but interesting.’ Reece said. The book he had fished out of his backpack after wiping the grease off his hands with a paper napkin was Rivertown by Peter Hessler. Kurt’s parents had given it to him as a gift the last time he’d been back in Australia. He hadn’t been able to finish it. The author’s achievements as a teacher and writer in China made Kurt feel like he’d wanted his time in the middle kingdom.

‘What did you think?

‘Didn’t learn much but it’s well written. Glad we’re in Shanghai in 2005 and not bumfuck Fuling in 1996.’

‘What about his relationship with the students? He got through to them and learnt so much about their lives. They wrote some great essays for him. Do you think it was all down to him? Or his English major students in that backwater were different than our students?’

‘Who knows? I’m glad I teach oral English. I don’t want to spend my weekends marking essays.’

Kurt appreciated that Reece didn’t want to try to be someone he wasn’t. Did Kurt want to be like Hessler—a bridge between East and West? To get his students to open up and tell their stories? Then he could use those stories to make broad conclusions about the development of China. No he’d rather not be in the classroom at all.

After their afternoon classes, Kurt and Reece elbowed their way onto a bus leaving for the Xuhui campus. The bus arrived at Xuhui campus at four. From there, they took the subway to Shanxi South Road.

‘Do we go left or right?’ Reece asked as they came out of exit four.

‘You’re the one who lives in this area…but right. I’m sure it’s right.’

Down a narrow back street, the smell of barbecued lamb hit them first, then the vendor’s yells. ‘Yangrou chuan!’ He belted out in Chinese, and then switched to another language with a lot of rolled r sounds that neither the two laowai or the local Han Chinese could understand.

Around a sharp corner, the owner of the voice came into view. He had a reddish-brown face and wore a white skull cap over his thick black hair. Piles of lamb skewers sat next to the rectangular charcoal grill he stood in front of, metal tongs at the ready.

‘Ba’ge,’ Reece said to him, making the Chinese sign for eight with his right hand, which looked something like the American hang loose gesture.

The vendor put the skewers on the grill and the fat started spitting.

‘La bu la?’

‘La,’ Reece said and the man picked up a metal shaker and sprinkled the meat with chili flakes.

Ziran? The vendor asked.

‘Yao ziran,’ Reece said, nodding his head to prevent any ambiguity. This time the man picked up his cumin seed shaker.

Kurt’s stomach rumbled, he knew despite being fatty the meat would taste good. With Reece, he entered the small restaurant empty of customers. Take away skewers made up the majority of the business here. Another man in a skull cap, much more weathered than the first, approached them. ‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘come through.’ 

He led the two laowai into a back room with paint peeling off the walls. A picture of a mosque with twin minarets was the only decoration. They sat down at a round table. Their host lit a long wooden pipe and handed it to Reece saying, ‘It’s just tobacco.’ Reece took a puff and gave the pipe to Kurt, who, not being a smoker, took a hit and started coughing loudly. A hint of a smile passed across the Muslim man’s face. The laowai had been here before and knew his name was Ali.

Next, the young man from out front came in with the cooked skewers. Ali got up, left the room, and came back with two plates.

‘You want a skewer?’ Kurt asked him to be polite.

‘No, I eat far too many of those.’

Ali spoke Mandarin with a heavy accent but Kurt found communicating with him easy because he used simple vocabulary. Also, Kurt didn’t need to worry about missing a tone or mixing up word order, Ali always got his meaning the first time—a different experience from talking with the Han Chinese, who, Kurt reckoned, made great efforts to not understand what he said.

‘I have something special today,’ Ali said, and then paused to see what reaction he’d get.

‘What would that be?’ Reece asked with interest.

‘Yapian.’

The word made Kurt both excited and fearful.

Reece looked at Kurt in askance but before Kurt could translate, Ali filled Reece in by saying the word epyun in his native language. The pronunciation was close enough to the English for Reece to guess.

‘Ah, opium, great. Let’s have a look. I’ve always wanted to try it.’

Ali again left the room. When he came back he handed Reece something small wrapped in newspaper. ‘Open and smell it,’ he said.

Reece unwrapped the paper to reveal a black lump. Reece took a whiff and handed it to Kurt. Instead of the pungent smell of hash, this substance had a sweet smell and was hard to the touch.

Kurt knew he couldn’t dissuade Reece from buying the opium. What would be the punishment for two Westerners caught with this drug that the West had imposed on China in its hundred years of humiliation? A severe one, but not as bad as it would be for Ali and his son if they got caught with opium. Members of the Urghur minority, these Turkic Muslims didn’t fit in with the Communist Party’s plan for a homogeneous and compliant population. A good excuse to lock two of them up would be most welcome.

Apart from drugs and meat skewers, Kurt’s interactions with Urghurs included being hassled by vendors selling pieces of the enormous nut cakes outside subway stations. Month-old stale nut cakes, if you listened to Kurt’s students, who also warned that the Urghur vendors carried knives and would mug you if they had the chance before making a quick getaway on their cake bearing tricycles. Such muggings seemed unlikely on Shanghai’s crowded streets. Yes, these vendors had knives: to cut the cake. The one time he’d bought a piece of nut cake, he’d found it delicious.

That the students believed the Urghurs to be dangerous criminals, Kurt put down to government propaganda. Often university students proved more brainwashed than others in China because they’d spent their whole lives absorbing party-controlled education. Funnily enough, no student ever accused the Urghurs of being drug dealers.

Passing a Urghur man crouched on the footpath whispering, ‘You want hashish?’ was a common place experience for laowai in Shanghai. This could get old quick, like Indians trying to sell you cheap suits on Nathan Road in Hong Kong. Despite the annoyances, Kurt appreciated the Urghurs for the drop of multiculturalism they brought to the streets of China. He also liked to bring them up with his students—it was one of the few topics that got them talking.  

Opium didn’t come cheap but Kurt agreed to pay half of the eight hundred yuan the pellet cost. He put in another hundred for their fortnightly supply of hashish. They finished the lamb skewers and shook hands with Ali.

Back on the street, Reece said, ‘Lets go to mine. Ronghua will be out playing mahjong.’ 

Sometimes Kurt and Reece went to a foreign-owned dive bar that opened at five to split the hash, but opening up a package of opium needed a safer environment. Reece lived in a non-descript twenty-five storey apartment building. He paid four thousand a month, almost double Kurt’s rent. How did Reece save money? The apartment had a decent sized living room: big enough for a dining table, two armchairs, sofa, and a large TV flanked by the de rigueur piles of pirate DVDs. The small kitchen featured a two burner gas cooker, small fridge, microwave, and a water cooler. Standard stuff. Only the non-stinking toilet bowl made Kurt jealous. New millennium plumbers in China had figured out that you needed to put an S shape in the piping below toilets so the fumes from the sewage below didn’t rise up.

‘You done it before Kurt?’ Reece asked.

‘No.’

‘Me neither. Take a seat, I’m going to get our smoking device.’

Reece went to the kitchen and returned with a small can of coconut milk. He ripped open the old fashioned metal tab, and downed the contents in one. Next he took a pen and deftly poked two holes in the can, one in the bottom and a larger one in the side. Smoking device ready, the two men sat down on the sofa. Reece unwrapped the opium and broke off a small piece. Holding the can horizontally he stuck this piece in the larger hole. He brought the can to his mouth, he lit opium and sucked. He took his index finger on and off the smaller hole to control the flow of oxygen to the burning drug.

When Kurt’s turn came, the sweet taste of the opium surprised him. After a couple of rounds they stopped. Not knowing the potency or how long the drug would take to have an effect, they needed to play things safe.

Kurt started to feel good, and after five minutes he turned to Reece and said, ‘I’m ready for more.’

But Reece wasn’t there and it hadn’t been five minutes. Kurt could just make out a soft snore from the bedroom and his cell phone showed that he’d been sitting on the sofa for two hours. What a waste, he thought. Reece was sleeping away a great buzz. Kurt forced himself to get off the sofa and out the door.

The lights of Shanghai amazed him walking to the subway stop. On the crowded streets of China other pedestrians always seemed to do their level best to bump into him but tonight they glided round him. Sadly, he could feel the buzz fading on the subway train. He tried to hold onto it, but the smell of disinfectant was very sobering.